Bon er Vrai ("Good and True"): William Prynne's High Art of Insult

This rare first edition of William Prynne’s Histriomastix (1633) is by all accounts an unusual book. The publication of the Puritan anti-theatrical tirade, in the very year Queen Henrietta Maria herself took to the stage, cost the author not only his job but also—and famously so—his ears (cutting off ears was actually a standard penalty for seditious libel in Renaissance England). Our copy is similarly maimed: it is missing its front cover and the extensive damage to the spine makes visible the intricate stitching that struggles to hold the beautiful volume together. Yet, despite this well-loved condition, somebody ensured the survival of the nearly 400-year old battered book. Perhaps the owner was a collector of the short-lived, early modern “-mastix” genre.

Hearkening back to the meaning of the affix “–mastix” (a Greek term for “a whipping”), authors writing “mastiges” would lambaste subjects of their choosing. Prynne elevated the form by ranting, for more than a thousand pages, against all things stagecraft. In fact, his Histriomastix became so notorious that his last name outlived him in the form of Hester Prynne, the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel The Scarlet Letter.Notice how Prynne’s crammed 43-line long title showcases both the author’s vitriolic insistence on Puritan reform and his unrestrained verbosity. The Puritans harshly opposed the theatre because, as Prynne puts it, “Stage playes are the very Devils owne peculiar pompes, Play-houses his Synagogues.” Ironically, Prynne structured his high-spirited anti-theatrical critique in the form of a stage play: the work is divided into both acts and scenes, with a bar adorning the top of every page reminiscent of Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623). Our copy was first owned by a certain “Rog. Dav.” prior to the popularization of graphite pencils in the nineteenth century, as the abbreviated inked signature on the upper right-hand corner of the title page records to this day. A later owner penciled additional marginalia alongside passages that condemn women on the stage, scribbling in French, “bon er vrai,” which in English means “good and true.” Affirmed in his disdain for the theatre and women in the theatre in particular, this radical thinker might have brought our copy of the Histriomastix to Kansas just as the state was burgeoning into a rhetorical battleground. During the settlement period known as “Bleeding Kansas,” abolitionist polemicists stole the spotlight. In this volatile literary landscape, Prynne’s text might have served as a rhetorical model for verbal insult and defamation. Never a man to censor his words, Prynne’s brazen invective attacks, for example, “play haunters,” or theatre patrons, by calling them “adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons.”

Hunter Nelson

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